Aleppo before the war
This is what victory looks like
LAST MEN IN ALEPPO (De sidste mænd i Aleppo) B+
Syria Netherlands Denmark
(102 mi) 2017 director:
Feras Fayyad
co-directors: Kareem Abeed, Mujahed Abou Al Joud, Fadi Al
Halabi, Steen Johannessen, Hassan Kattan, Khaled Khateeb, Yaman Khatib, and Thaer
Mohamad
We all die here
together.
Arguably the best of a recent batch of Syrian documentaries,
winner of the World Cinema Grand Jury Prize in the documentary category at
Sundance, and remarkable for the personal insights provided about retaining courage
under fire. But if you want to imagine an
even more dangerous world, imagine every time President Trump decided to tweet
one of his cryptic messages that bombs would be dropped on various American
cities that he deemed targets of dissent.
That is essentially what has happened in Assad’s Syria, where for the
last six years he’s been dropping barrel bombs out of helicopters on his own
citizens, an aerial assault from which they are completely defenseless, as they
have no ground-to-air weapons to protect themselves. The result has been a one-sided slaughter of
Syrian citizens, where more than 400,000 have been killed, with one out of ten
Syrians wounded or killed, yet according to BBC News reports only 1% of those
killed have been rebel soldiers, as the rest are all civilians. While this is the root of the great refugee
crisis that has paralyzed Europe, the biggest humanitarian and refugee crisis
of our time, with 11 million Syrian refugees exiting the country since the
start of the civil war (2011). Feras
Fayyad is a Syrian born journalist and filmmaker who was previously arrested
and tortured after filming protesters tearing down a portrait of Assad, where
he was suspected of being a Western spy, as are nearly all who study abroad,
eventually released where he now lives safely in Denmark. Shot in the year beginning in September 2015,
Fayyad was unable to enter Aleppo due to a four-year military siege where the
city was essentially surrounded by Assad troops, but a four-man crew, including
cinematographers Fadi al Halabi and Thaer Mohammed, also cameraman Mujahed Abou
Al Joud (each named as co-directors), were already in place. Up until the second year of the civil war,
Aleppo was still a world class city, the largest in Syria, with a history that
reaches back five thousand years, one of the three oldest inhabited cities in
human history (along with Damascus and Sana’a), added to UNESCO’s World
Heritage List in 1986, drawing visitors from all over the globe, where a
mixture of Arabs and Turks, Armenians and French, Muslims, Christians, and Jews
lived together peacefully. Abraham was
said to have grazed his sheep on the hills of Aleppo, while Alexander the Great
founded a settlement there. The city
under the Biblical name of Aram Soba, or Halab in Arabic, considered an
extended part of Israel, is mentioned in the Book of Samuel and Psalm 60,
and was also at one end of the ancient trading route known as the Silk
Road. The Citadel built in the 13th
century remains one of the world’s oldest castles, offering Muslim protection
against the Christian Crusaders, though it was heavily damaged in the Syrian
bombing. Aleppo is even referred to in
Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Macbeth Act 1
Scene 3 - The Witches meet Macbeth, spoken by the First Witch, “Her
husband’s to Aleppo gone, master o’ the Tiger,” and again by Othello just
before he stabs himself near the end of Act 5 Scene 2 (Othello:
Act 5, Scene 2 - PlayShakespeare.com), when Aleppo was a Turkish city under
the Ottoman Empire, the third largest after Constantinople and Cairo, recalling
that in Aleppo he discovered a “malignant Turk” beating a Venetian, with
Othello saving the Venetian by killing the Turk, who he describes as a
“circumcised dog,” though striking a Turk in Aleppo was punishable by
death. To the British, Aleppo at that
time would be considered a faraway and mysterious place, a place where English
merchants purchased what are today thoroughbred racehorses.
What’s most striking about this film is that it takes place
entirely within a deteriorating war zone, a place already reduced to
devastation and ruin, with people living in the surviving rubble, continually clearing
away the debris, where we follow a group of voluntary emergency workers known
as the White Helmets whose aim is to work together to save lives as they race
to every bomb site, putting out fires, tending to the dead and wounded, sending
survivors off to hospitals, while poking around the wreckage and digging
through the debris searching for more bodies.
As we see them pull babies and young children from the fallen debris,
using jackhammers and axes to cut and pull away heavy concrete stones obstructing
their path, it’s clear most that are found are already dead, where they rejoice
at every live body discovered. This is
the most hazardous work imaginable, placing themselves at the center of the
biggest human disasters, where their work involves precariously placing
themselves teetering on the edge of damaged buildings already on the verge of collapse,
where they constantly come face-to-face with death while continually placing
themselves in harm’s way. While not part
of the film, the White Helmets are the subject of great controversy, as they
are the target of a disinformation campaign led by Assad supporters and Russia
sponsored propaganda outlets, including inflammatory claims of links with
terrorist activities. To see this, one
need look no further than the Roger Ebert film website, Last Men in
Aleppo Movie Review (2017) | Roger Ebert, where in the Comments section
there are deriding remarks from Norman Brown, Daniel Carrapa, Helga Fellay, and
AllWormsMust Die, suggesting the film is promoting fake news, calling the
actions of the White Helmets utter fiction, where the gist of it is “The White
Helmets are a UK and USA created and funded group hired to film propaganda
videos. The videos I have seen are
completely faked and staged.” In support
of their view, they site what appears to be a news website from Global Research
(http://www.globalresearch.ca/forget-oscar-give-the-white-helmets-the-leni-riefenstahl-award-for-best-war-propaganda-film/5577778),
with a glaring headline, “Forget Oscar: Give The White Helmets the Leni
Riefenstahl Award for Best War Propaganda Film.” On further review, it is the Global Research
Center (Global Research - Centre for
Research on Globalization) that is promulgating the fake news, as they are
part of the Putin propaganda arm designed to undermine Western democracies by
slandering and destabilizing accurate news coverage that runs counter to their
aims, where at one website (How
legitimate is The Centre for Global Research? - Quora), a flow chart reveals
Global Research’s place in the Putin hierarchy.
In addition, the fact-checking organization Snopes.com has thoroughly
debunked these outrageous claims undermining the White Helmets (Syrian
Rescue Organization 'The White Helmets' Are ... - Snopes.com), but to put
it bluntly, one can’t be anything less than flabbergasted to see these kinds of
comments appear on a mainstream film website known for reviewing movie releases,
usually discussing Woody Allen and the like, hardly a political entity. But the shocking reality is the full extent
of Putin’s reach, as you can find examples of it almost anywhere, yet it all
appears so innocuous. Needless to say,
the White Helmets are a humanitarian relief organization committed to aiding
victims of continued Syrian and Russian air attacks, men who are wholly devoted
to preserving human life, and were among those nominated for the 2016 Nobel
Peace Prize (eventually awarded to Juan Manuel Santos of Colombia), continually
placing themselves on the front lines, where as of October of 2016 from The Independent (Syria
conflict: The Nobel Peace Prize-nominated White Helmets ..., check out the scathingly
negative comments there as well), they have pulled 62,000 people alive from decimated,
bombed-out buildings, often with aerial attacks still going on, while out of 3,000
volunteers who have joined up in the past three years, 145 have been killed and
another 430 have been injured.
While the visual destruction on display is overwhelming,
comparable to Stalingrad or the Warsaw Ghetto, with Mahleresque symphonic music
written by Danish composer Karsten Fundal that feels entirely appropriate, where
the escalating air strikes were only intensified in the past year, the focus of
the film follows two members of the White Helmets, Khaled Omar Harrah, one of
the founders, a former painter and decorator who is married with two young
daughters, and Mahmoud, a young single man and a former philosophy student at a
university working with his younger brother Ahmad who joins him on his rounds. The men are not rebel soldiers, but had normal
jobs before the Assad siege. “The
dilemma is our children,” insists Khaled, constantly searching the sky for
warplanes overhead, who could easily pass as a Fassbinder look-alike, pudgy,
yet gregarious, outgoing, and friendly, with a broad smile, where it’s nearly
impossible not to like this guy.
Mahmoud, on the other hand, is quieter, more introspective, as he mostly
keeps to himself, remaining terrified that something will happen to his younger
brother Ahmad, feeling responsible for his safety, yet both are integral parts
of the rescue team. Similar to a war
correspondent on the scene, compiling a dossier of time-capsules, the camera
bears witness to the harrowing events, where Khaled is a hero to his admiring children
as they see footage of him pulling a living baby from out underneath the
rubble. In calmer moments, we see he is
never happier than when his girls are around, doting on them both, cherishing
the time they spend together and Skyping them when he’s away, a striking
contrast to his life in the White Helmets where death is his constant
companion. The prevailing mood here is
one of utter exhaustion, as they perform a Sisyphean duty that never ends, as
the bombings never stop, the devastation is all around them, where they are
continually racing against time, yet one of the unique strengths of the film is
how vividly developed their characters become in front of the camera, refusing
to be deterred, lifting up each other’s sagging spirits, even finding humor in
the absurdity of it all, but these guys are constantly thrust into the eye of
the storm. Mahmoud is quietly modest,
seen talking to a young boy that he pulled from the ashes, encouraging him to
make something of his life, while he wants no adulation for himself,
increasingly uncomfortable that the boy can’t stop clinging to him. “I didn’t like that,” he tells Khaled, “I’m
not going to visit anyone again because I feel like this is showing off,
showing these people that I saved their lives and I’m not like that.” Dedicated to the core, Mahmoud’s anxiety is
directed towards his younger brother, confessing that his parents still think
they are both living comfortably with jobs in Turkey, as he can’t bear to tell
them the truth. Normally, we see an
overly concerned Khaled tell his kids not to play in the streets, or hang out
in groups, as they make themselves a visible target. When a temporary ceasefire is declared, he
euphorically drives them to a public park, where kids of all ages have gathered
to play on the swings and slides, with parents finally smiling from the relief,
where it feels like an oasis in the desert.
But it’s not long before loudspeakers announce helicopter sightings,
urging people to quickly disperse. While
there is footage of jubilant street demonstrations mocking Assad, calling him a
murderer, condemning him for crimes against humanity, the White Helmets don’t usually
spend their time discussing religion or politics, instead they wonder where is
the response from the West? “All dignity
is dead.” “Why don’t our Arab neighbors
help us?” “Where is the world, man?” “Shame on the Arab leaders. Just shame.”
The mood only grows more dire, with shocking footage of a large-scale
Russian bombing attack, where any thought of hope is actually a false illusion,
instead turning pensive and more contemplative, speaking of their own
mortality, expecting to die defending their city. Ignoring facts and figures, which tell only one
side of the story, this is an extraordinary portrait of humanity among the
ruins, accentuating the inner lives of the participants, as we share acute
moments of intimacy with them, where it’s all the more tragic how it comes to
an abrupt end, as there’s simply no good way to face the city’s ultimate
destiny, where by Christmas the city falls, retaken by Syrian forces, with the
aid of an extensive Russian bombing campaign that killed three times the number
of Syrian civilians than ISIS fighters, where one can only imagine what defeat
feels like to these men who fought so valiantly for their families to remain
free from dictatorship while struggling to preserve the last remnants of their
city and culture, now already a distant memory.
Aleppo
Before the War - The Atlantic
photographic essay of Aleppo before and after the war, by Alan Taylor
from The Atlantic, December 21, 2016
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